The law factory

If it were human, parliament would suffer from awful indigestion. It chews up too much legislation much too quickly, passing 56 government bills into law in the past year, including the Companies Act, the longest law in history. Nineteen acts were hustled on to the statute book this week as the parliamentary year came to an end. But the banquet is barely over before it begins again, with a Queen's speech next week trailed - as it always seems to be - for its emphasis on law and order.

Labour is not the only government that has sought to define itself through legislation, but it has been far the most active, as the Liberal Democrats pointed out yesterday. Since 1997 parliament has passed 23 criminal justice acts, five immigration acts, seven anti-terror laws, 10 education acts and 11 involving health and social care. The new laws, the Lib Dems claim, have created 3,000 criminal offences - almost one a day - and add up to 114,000 pages. That means parliament has passed more than one page of legislation for every hour that Labour has been in office. The workrate is staggering.

As bills are hustled through Westminster's stages, scrutiny becomes haphazard, good in parts but unpredictable. MPs are more questioning than they used to be, rebelling more often, and some bills in the last session were properly debated, such as the Education Act and England's public smoking ban. The three criminal justice bills expected next week are also a tribute to parliament's resilience, since they are likely to include a return to proposals that have already been rejected, such as the removal of juries from complex fraud trials. But other laws pass almost on the nod, while much of what government does, buried in delegated legislation, is almost never considered. More than 32,000 such statutory instruments have been passed since 1997.

All this might be tolerated, if the legislation proved itself once in place. But an increasing amount is simply being put forward for political effect, a way of catching opposition parties in synthetic legislative traps. This will certainly be true of next week's Queen's speech. The result is that government is tripping over itself, passing more legislation than it can ever use. The 2003 Criminal Justice Act is one offender: 73 sections and 17 schedules have never come into force and even the bits that have been used by the courts are set to be scrapped in a new Home Office bill next week. Government is degraded by such shallow behaviour. It becomes less effective and less trusted. Fewer laws, and better ones, would be welcome.